Bacterial growth is controlled by the domain-specific peptidoglycan (PG) cell wall, a rigid and essential structure composed of glycan strands cross-linked by D-amino acid (DAA)-containing short peptides, whose biosynthesis machinery is a target for antibiotics.
Despite the importance of PG, knowledge of its dynamics has been severely hampered by lack of a strategy for direct imaging of sites of PG biosynthesis in live cells. Significant limitations of current labeling methods, such as toxic effects and poor membrane permeability of the probes, have limited their applicability to only a small set of bacterial species. Moreover, these methods are labor-intensive and their sensitivity suffers from their indirect and multiple-step nature.
Methods relying on fluorescently labeled antibiotics to study bacterial cell wall synthesis and to discover new antibiotics to which bacteria remain susceptible have had a profound impact on the field. The current methods, however, have at least two inherent limitations. First, antibiotic concentration needs to be carefully controlled to avoid damage to the cell. Second, because these agents bind to specific sites on cell surfaces, they only will appear at sites of active PG biosynthesis.
For the foregoing reasons, there is a need for additional compositions and methods for assessing PG biosynthesis in bacteria and for discovering bacterial cell wall-acting/-disrupting agents that can be used to treat infections caused by multidrug-resistant bacteria.